Minute Particulars
His father and mother had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry,…
Category: World Literature
Stay with Christ
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous dictum that he would stay with Christ even if he were proven scientifically wrong suggests no more and no less than a belief in the primacy of moral values over theoretical knowledge….
The Talmud Jew
The Talmud Jew doesn’t kill. He doesn’t take part in wild orgies. You don’t have to fear him in the woods or on a lonely road. He doesn’t carry a gun. He doesn’t scheme to…
Portrait of the Artist as a Kid
In his new school James excelled at lessons and won prizes for the best English compositions. The money helped to buy clothes and food for the needy family and even allowed for little trips to…
Today’s One-Liner (#187)
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce, A Portrait of…
Read “The Demons”!
What would Dostoevsky say about our “multicultural” universities, our dismal sexual “liberations,” our radical feminists forcing their “all-inclusive” versions of the Bible down the throat of meekly submissive Christian churches? We do not have to…
Endurable
“I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are…
Two Types
We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were…
Up to Marcel
I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was…
Today’s One-Liner (#176)
Friends boasted that Proust could declaim whole pages of Balzac by heart. –Josef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, trans. Eric Karpeles, p. 33.